Hello, 20th Century
As the 20th American musical century began, it was, of course, exactly like the 19th century. What was that like? Well, being sentimental was huge and had been most of the whole damn century. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we’re talking sentimentality beyond restraint or limits. When the 20th century begins to roll, a damper begins to be put on that sort of thing. For the first time ever, in the 1890s, signs of the damper were stirring, to use a mixed metaphor. Charles Dickens had given innumerable tours, during which he read from his works. The most sure-fire crowd pleaser was the death of Little Nell, who lived and died as an abused child in his novel, The Old Curiosity Shop. That got ‘em every time. But in the Gay ‘90s, Oscar Wilde said, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing”. And the wind had begun to blow.
What else was huge? Five-string banjo and minstrel shows––“The first emanation of a pervasive and purely American mass culture”, as Nick Tosches called the type of entertainment that was the heart of 19th century show biz––were still popular in the early 20thcentury. Both started to catch on big in the 1830s, when minstrel shows swept the country, and then, eventually, most of the Western world. And cowboys didn’t play guitars. They played five-string banjos, along with much of the general public. The popularity of banjos in the 19th century is similar to that of guitars in the 20th, but in the 19th century banjos were much more popular than guitars. The guitar in the 19th century, the parlor guitar, was mainly a middle-and-upper class lady’s instrument. The guitar was not to take hold of the general public until soldiers, mainly from the lower classes, brought them back from Cuba after the Spanish-American War (in 1898).
Also mega at the outset of the 20th century were marching bands. The John Phillip Sousa band was the most popular musical entity in the US for decades. He disdained the new-fangled phonograph, believing it would end homemade music.
An ongoing feature of 19th century American music was White appropriation of “Black” music (or, more accurately, an errant grasp of it). This was also a characteristic of 20th century American music, and is, of course, an ongoing feature of 21stcentury American music. So it goes. Much of 19th century Black music was written by Whites in their interpretation of Black style, and basically depicted Blacks as “Sambos”: simple, childlike, and happy-even-joyful with their status as slaves.
The exception to these songs was “Negro Spirituals”, which were actually written by Blacks. They were introduced the world by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who were formed in 1871 at Nashville’s Black Fisk University in an effort to raise money for the financially troubled institution. Despite many hardships––hotels refusing to accommodate them, restaurants refusing to feed them, and often derisive reactions from the press and public––their music eventually caught on. They toured the United States and Europe, playing before President U.S. Grant and Queen Victoria, and raised more than enough money to sustain Fisk University. The Fisk Jubilee Singers remain a Fisk University tradition to this day.
Ragtime, another Black style, dating to the 1890s, had a deep and profound influence on American popular music. Its basic feature was rhythmic emphasis on the 2 and 4 beats, a feature of Black music in pre-colonial Africa. In a 1913 interview published in the Black newspaper New York Age, Scott Joplin asserted that there had been “Ragtime music in America every since the Negro race has been here, but White people took no notice of it until about 20 years ago.” Another feature of ragtime was that it was totally lacking in sentimentality. By 1900, the ragtime beat started to dominate popular music, kick-starting Tin Pan Alley on 28th street in Manhattan, the new heart of American popular music, which had previously made its home on 14th street.
It’s curious that restrictive and racist Jim Crow laws started being enacted at this time, and that Jim Crow was a blackface character, dating from the 1830s, when Black music began to take hold of American culture. In the midst of all that bigotry, ragtime doubled down Black influence on White music. Slightly predating ragtime were “coon songs”. Unlike the sentimentality of Old South-centric Black composed (“Carry Me Back To Old Virginny”) and White composed (“Old Black Joe”) songs, coon songs were about Blacks in the present, in cities. Unlike Sambos, coons were lazy, insolent, morally loose, and inclined towards theft and gambling. Sambos knew their place; coons did not.
Most coon songs were written by Whites, although many, like the wildly popular “All Coons Look Alike To Me”, were written by Blacks (that one by Ernest Hogan). Whenever Jack Johnson, the first Black Heavyweight Boxing Champion, appeared in the ring the White audience would mock him by singing that song. Ernest Hogan regretted this, but he pointed out that the song was the introduction of ragtime rhythm to tens of thousands of Whites. The popularity of coon songs faded around the time that ragtime gave way to jazz, in the late teens.
Ernest Hogan formed the Memphis Students in 1905. This pioneering group marks a turning point in how Black musicians presented themselves on stage. Until then, Black performers had typically had to make themselves blacker before they got on stage. When young Sammy Davis Junior applied blackface, he, like other Blacks “blacking up” back then, would apply white makeup around their mouths so they would look “authentic”, like Al Jolson and Eddy Cantor. The Memphis Students put on the first Black performances that contained no comedic racist stereotypes. They were among the first Black entertainers to perform in formal wear as opposed to the more standard clown-like minstrel garb. That said, a number of Black classical ensembles and spiritual groups had been performing in formal wear since sometime in the 19th century.
For anyone with an interest in this period, I strongly recommend the book, Stomp And Swerve: American Music Gets Hot, 1843-1924, by David Wondrich. The book explains how the stomp, the beat, the swerve, the bending and sliding of notes equals hot, and goes into fascinating detail about the interaction of Black and White music. It offered much information that was new to me. Wondrich was originally a bass player in a punk band, and like many punk musicians, he eventually became interested in American roots music. Better yet, Archeophone Records offers a CD of the music referred to in the book and provides a perfect ongoing reference. Everyone I’ve introduced this book to has been knocked out by it.
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